Adron Hall
Jovial, Lean/Kanban/Scrum Agile, Pairing, TDD (sometimes test after) software architect and programmer. Worked with cloud computing services since 2007 using big data (8 billion rows of data on an AVERAGE day) and everything from business intelligence to the nitty gritty of array structures inside file based data stores to create caching tiers for custom software needs.
Currently pushing for cloud technologies, better data centers, the best software development practices and keeping everything secure in the financial industry again.
Tier 3 Brings Out The Heavy Guns!
There are cloud offerings and then there are cloud offerings. As of today, Tier 3 just loaded up some big guns. Over the years Tier 3 has provided an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) play using various geographically located data-centers with high level disaster recovery, high availability (99.999%), utility compute, and high speed storage to [...]
AppFog, Fort of Awesome & Node PDX Updated!
Time for the secret to be out of the bag. I’m currently working on contract with the awesome company of AppFog in the Fort of Awesome. Let me tell you, it is indeed awesome too! You might ask why I am working with them? How do I align with them? What is it they do? [...]
Steve Jobs
I have paid attention to Steve Jobs only in knowing he was producing some pretty sexy products at Apple. I had never owned one until December 23rd of 2011. I had however respected Apple & Job’s Products. I knew very little about the level of his drive and passion. I also knew little about his [...]
Macbook Air Multiple Monitor Support
The Macbook Air is indeed an “insanely great” device. I have slammed this thing around, physically and virtually, from the bicycle messenger bag situation described in my buying decision post, all the way to running multiple virtual machines and multiple monitors! This machine, of course if you’re using lean, clean, powerful, and intelligent built software, [...]
Small, Powerful, Elegant, Sexy, and Hard Core
Ok, it’s that time of the year and I’m at the phase of the cycle when it is computer purchasing time. What do I want, what do I need, who has the best options available? In order of priority here’s my wish list for the ideal machine.
It must be able to run Windows & Linux. Even better would be the ability to run OS-X, Windows, and Linux. Preferably with Linux or OS-X as the core operating system and Windows either virtualized or dual booted.
Another high priority is I want elegant, sexy, and strong design. But not just in appearance but in functionality too. I want the device to be strong. I want the material to be fabricated well, I want the quality and durability to be built into the device. This comes down to the device being a single mold, probably of a high quality material like aluminum.
I want as much oomph as I can get out of the hardware. Demanding elegant and sexy usually dictates it won’t be powerful. Demanding tough is usually another strike against that.
Another thing which is super important, but I may be flexible on, is the resolution. I simply want as much resolution as possible.
The last thing, which isn’t as important, is I don’t really want to pay more than about $1500. I’d be all the happier if I can find something for even less.
Narrowing Down the Machines… (click through to read the entire article)
Reality Distortion Field : 17 Companies’ Sitrep
I’m sitting on the bus this morning. As happens almost every day of the week. I’m flipping pages, sort of, it’s an eBook on my Kindle App. I’m reading about Steve Jobs taking over the Macintosh Program at Apple. How things started to fall into place for Apple, for the Macintosh, and how Jobs saw what could be a pushed for it. Everybody else; Microsoft, Xerox, Canon, and practically every single other company was missing it. Xerox Parc had it right in front of them, the GUI, Mouse, Object Oriented Language, and about every single thing we assume for computer use and development today but wasn’t doing anything with it. They were all missing it, except Jobs. The eccentric, crazed, reality distortion field generating Jobs pushed forward and found those that agreed, this was absolutely the future. Today’s computers owe so much to Jobs efforts to pull these people together, to what he saw as the future, and our modern computing world will forever be indebted to Steve Jobs.
Howard Hues had done this 50 years earlier. He simply stated, “nobody wants to fly on a plane at 10k feet and get shaken to pieces, planes need to fly at 30,000 feet or more were the air is smooth!” He then went about working to get a plane built that could do this! The Government was in his way, the industry was fighting him, everybody said this wasn’t the way to go. Nobody could build a plane that would do that right now! It’s absurd. He did it, and bought every single one of them he could putting the airline (TWA) in hock at the same time! But it paid off, and his airline had the nicest planes, best flight in the world, easily. Today’s airlines are all modeled after this ideal, our modern travel owes a huge debt to what Howard Hughes pushed forward.
The competition, the fighting pushed the envelope, but in both cases a visionary could see the future. To them it was plain as an image on a clear sunny day. To them, the future didn’t need to be tomorrow, it was ready right now. The future just needed dragged kicking and screaming directly into today! They did this, they pulled people together who could make these changes, and they with their teams yanked the future right into humanity’s grasp.
…read more, click through…
Geoloqi, CivicApps, and TriMet API/SDKs
I’m heading off on yet another coding adventure this coming weekend. I can never get enough hackathons, startup weekends, and such. The energy, creativity, and learning is unbeatable at these types of events. This adventure will be mashing up a plethora of APIs (SDKs) and other capabilities to build something cool against. What it may [...]
Me on TDD/BDD/Pairing and Jason Fried’s TED Talk and “why work isn’t done in the office…”
This talk is so right, but could it be so wrong at the same time?
…click through to see the video…
Just watch this, that’s all I have to say. Jason is so right about this topic. Here’s a few quotes to convince you.
“I’m going to talk about work, and why people can’t seem to get things done at work…”
“If you ask people the question, “where do you go when you really need to get something done?” you typically get three different types of answers; one is a kind of a place, a location or a room, another is a moving object, a third is a time…”
“The Train” < – That one caught my fancy, if you've ever talked to be about transit you know that one caught me… 
"What you almost never hear people say is "the office""
"Managers and bosses will tell you the distractions at work are things like Facebook, Youtube…" "…and they'll go so far as to ban it…" "…what is this China?!"
"The real problem in the modern office is the M & Ms" < – Oh hell yeah, so very true.
"Manager's jobs are really to interrupt people…" "…they don't really do work so they have to interrupt you."
"You would never see a spontaneous meeting of employees, no, managers do that…"
High Availability From Non-High Availability: OpenStack, Dell, Crowbar, Private Clouds, and Moving the Enterprise Forward…
The Environment Recently a conversation came up about high availability in a traditional Enterprise Environment. Let me paint the picture for this environment; “This environment has several hundred servers, and several hundred applications. These application range in simple client server applications to n-tier applications strung across multiple services and machines. Some are resilient, some are [...]
OS-X, Top 2 Gripes
I’ve been developing in my spare time on Mac OS-X using Rubymine, Webstorm, TextMate, XCode, and several other apps. I’ve also been using Kindle (the native app and the HTML5 Version), Tweetdeck, and a host of other applications. A bulk of things I’ve also been using, however they’re almost entirely in Chrome/HTML5 or some web [...]
Following Good Practice, The Negative Bits About Windows Azure First, But Gems Included! :D
Ok, I’ve used Windows Azure steadily over the last year and a half. I’ve fought with the SDK so much that I stopped using it. I decided I’d put together this recap of what has driven me crazy and then put together something about the parts that I really like, the awesome bits, the parts [...]
Mac Battles, The Personal Day to Day of Software Development and Morale
I’ve been using a Mac for a couple of months now. My employer purchased a few for us coders to try out, and I’ve become spoiled. I rarely want to use my other machines now, as they seem cumbersome and inefficient. Mainly from a hardware perspective, as the OS itself seems to have plusses and [...]
Resumes Are Worthless
Ok, so a question came up recently about hiring people for software development roles. In answering that, the group discussing this started talking about resumes. Resumes, which I’m told mine looks good and reads well, hold a certain value to someone entering the field of software development. There are also major problems with having a [...]
Bing Maps Data Center Time Lapse
This is pretty cool. A minute and a half time lapse of a data center build out in Colorado. It’s kind of interesting, in a hardware hacker geek kind of way. :) (Cross-posted @ Composite Code)
Spotlight on HP Open Source
While at OSCON 2011 I spoke to a Phil Robb, Bryan Gartner, and Terri Molini with HP. Phil is heading up the Open Source Program Office for HP, which we spoke about. Context and Clarity: I knew HP was involved in cloud computing to some degree, know they make tons of devices, hardware, printers, and know they [...]
